Garth Brooks In Country Music Fall of Fame: Harbinger Of Doom

Even though Mason Lankford said, "There will come a day when we forget the Rapture ever even happened," Rocks Off is keeping an eye out for signs of our impending Armageddon. We were wrong last time, but we're totally right this time!

Don't you never say no bad words about Chris Gaines.

We'd more or less forgotten about Garth Brooks, who took country music to the mainstream in the late '80s and early '90s. He became one of the top-selling artists of all time, and claimed fans from all over the world, but the strain of his career took its toll and he quietly bowed out of recording and performing as the millennium dawned.

And no, it had nothing to do with his Chris Gaines album, you close-minded philistines. Fun fact: Brooks' only U.S. Top 40 pop single is actually "Lost in You" from The Life of Chris Gaines.

Sorry for the vehemence. We were big into Brooks when we were in middle school, and there's still a place in our heart for the man's music. "In Lonesome Dove" from Ropin' the Wind is one of our favorite songs to this day. We'd link to a YouTube video for it, but there doesn't seem to be one. So instead we'll send you over to the song we blatantly ripped off from "In Lonesome Dove" to write. (We just added a wizard.)

That's why we were pleased to hear this week that Brooks will be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame later this year, along with Connie Smith and Hargus "Pig" Robbins. Kudos to you, Garth, and we'd be ecstatic, except that it means that the world is about to end.

As always, the answer lies in the Book of Revelation. Heeeeeeeere's Johnny...

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

- Rev. 22:1-2

That's from the end of Revelation, when all of the plagueing and whore-death is coming to a close and God lays out the super-happy ending. Now on the surface, where sane people frolic, this has nothing to do with Garth Brooks, but down here in La La Land it's as clear as an azure sky of purest summer.

Brooks is obviously a stand-in for "river," clearly linking the finale of the End Times to the Second Coming of the Garth. The 12 fruit would be the 12 studio albums that Brooks released that enabled his ultimate acesnsion.

The tree is a more obscure reference. As far as we know, Brooks only mentions trees in a single song, "Alabama Clay" from his 1989 self-titled album. Even then, it's only a passing allusion to family.

However, digging deeper into that song, it's the tale of a boy who runs away from his home on the farm, clearly meant to be the Garden of Eden, into the corruption of the city. A letter from an old girlfriend informing him that he has a son has him returning to the farm to live off the land in traditional family splendor.

You might recognize this theme as pretty much the entire point of Revelation. A world gone corrupt in the godless cities is reborn as a tilled field.

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